1 Introduction This Is Not, in Any Consistent Sense, a Study of Herbert Eimert’S Life, Times, Or Music

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Herbert Eimert and the Darmstadt School 1

1 Introduction This is not, in any consistent sense, a study of Herbert Eimert’s life, times, or music. Nor is it concerned with presenting a particularly detailed reading of his thought and writings about music. In fact, it argues that these writings enunciate a largely unaltered understanding of New Music over the course of almost half a century. Rather, it is expressly concerned with the relatively brief period of time at the beginning of the 1950s when Eimert’s understanding of New Music became the institutional discourse of New Music, which, more importantly and more to the point, in turn became the discourse which historians continue to deploy to explicate the development of the musical avant-garde in Europe after World War II – an avant-garde invariantly clustered in discursive formations of ‘post-Webern music’, ‘punctual music’, and the ‘Darmstadt School’. This study does not propose to account for how or why Eimert devised these concepts, but it does demonstrate deﬁnitively that they came from him. I do not give this demonstration as a sort of conspiratorial revelation; the prominence of cultural gatekeepers in the professional development of young composers is surely not a new and unexpected subject for scholarship. What is new and unexpected is (1) that Eimert’s blueprint for a ‘punctual’ avant-garde predates the ‘punctual’ works by Stockhausen by nearly thirty years; (2) that Eimert used the practices of now-obscure composers to explicate the practices of now-prominent ones, rendering explanations of what ‘Darmstadt composers’ were doing fundamentally confused and skewed; and (3) that this discourse is still deployed to explain New Music in the 1950s. The point here is that the discourse precedes the practice. As such, the explication for these musical practices under the Darmstadt banner – practices which, as a very large quantity of very thorough research has demonstrated, are far from uniform and in fact are quite nearly incommensurable under a single label – only deals with the music itself in a cursory, epiphenomenal manner.1 Consequently, the practice of music historiography has hitherto not dealt with this music at all. It has only dealt with the discourse Eimert made for it.

1 I am referring speciﬁcally to Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); M. J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Mark Delaere, ‘Olivier Messiaen’s Analysis Seminar and the Development of Post-War Serial Music’, trans. Richard Evans, Music Analysis, 21.1 (2002), 35–51; Inge Kovács, Wege zum musikalischen Strukturalismus: René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, John Cage und die Webern- Rezeption in Paris um 1950 (Schliengen: Argus, 2004); Christopher Fox, ‘Darmstadt and the Institutionalisation of Modernism’, Contemporary Music Review, 26.1 (2007), 115–23; Björn Heile, ‘Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism’, Twentieth-Century Music, 1.2 (2004), 161–78; Paul Attinello, ‘Postmodern or Modern: A Different Approach to Darmstadt’, Contemporary Music Review, 26.1 (2007), 25–37, in addition to others cited passim.

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A certain amount of historical scene-setting is necessary to appreciate Eimert’s interventions, and I hope to accomplish it quickly and relatively elegantly with a brief summary of the institution of Darmstadt and its key players from its inception in 1946 until 1951, when Eimert comes to the fore as a distinct cultural force. Karel Goeyvaerts, a Belgian composer who had recently completed his studies in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud, arrived at the 1951 courses after a series of early career successes, including a performance at the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) World Music Days of 1950. Goeyvaerts, who had previously incorpor- ated elements of his Roman Catholic faith into his compositions (his Tre lieder per sonare a venti-sei, for example, calls for an altar bell, typically rung when the celebrant gives the Eucharistic Prayer), now developed a sophisticated metaphysical method of composition in conjunction with fellow student Jean Barraqué.2 Both devout Catholics, Barraqué and Goeyvaerts expanded on several compositional techniques of their teacher Messiaen, who himself described his compositional practice as a method of expressing ‘the theology and the truths of our Catholic faith’.3 The result was a series of structural devices – crosses, mirror-symmetries, ciphers based on holy numbers – that largely eliminated the sorts of subjective decision-making that might normally be considered to be part of compositional craft. Indeed, Goeyvaerts termed this new ideal ‘selfless music’, the end result being a purified sound world that approximated a Neo-Platonic higher divine order removed from human experi- ence. Karlheinz Stockhausen, a composition student four years younger than Goeyvaerts and himself a devout Roman Catholic, encountered Goeyvaerts at the 1951 Darmstädter Ferienkurse and was deeply impressed with the older composer’s new method of composition, adopting it himself in Kreuzspiel, which he began immediately after the 1951 courses and completed in early 1952, with advice from Goeyvaerts. During the same period, Herbert Eimert was beginning to enlarge his sphere of influence as a cultural gatekeeper at the NWDR (Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk; later Westdeutscherrundfunk, WDR), and had made the acquaintance of both Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen, taking the latter tightly under his wing.4 The consequences of this relationship are the

2 See Max Erwin, ‘Who Is Buried in Webern’s Tomb? Orientations in the Reception of Serial Music from Messiaen to Stockhausen’, Perspectives of New Music, in press. 3 Olivier Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language, trans. John Satterﬁeld (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1956), I.13. 4 Goeyvaerts had met Eimert at the 1950 ISCM New Music Days; Eimert was particularly impressed that Goeyvaerts had a score of Webern’s Second Cantata, which had not been published yet, and the two followed this score during the performance of the piece. See Karel Goeyvaerts, ‘Paris – Darmstadt: 1947–1956: Excerpt from the Autobiographical Portrait’, trans. Mark Delaere, Revue belge de Musicologie/Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap,48 (1994), 39. Helmut Kirchmeyer suggests that Eimert’s relationship to the young Stockhausen was

Herbert Eimert and the Darmstadt School 3

focus of this study, and its central purpose is to demonstrate how Eimert deployed the compositional techniques used by Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen as a universal technical programme for New Music. Largely through Eimert’s influence, the early practice of Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen became the house style of the Darmstadt School, even though virtually no other composers – and certainly not their prominent peers Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Pierre Boulez – adopted these techniques or their attendant metaphysical ideology. On to Darmstadt. At the outset of the 1946 courses, director Wolfgang Steinecke described their objective in negative terms, as a necessary corrective to ‘a criminal cultural politics that robbed German musical life of its leading personalities and its connection with the world’.5 The primary rhetorical objective of the courses at their inception, then, was one of internationalisation and ‘catching up’ to the outside world (Nachholbedarf). It was uncertain, as the press response to the 1947 courses makes clear, whether a coherent avant-garde, let alone a modernist New Music, was to play any part in their proceedings. In retrospect, then, the courses are hardly recognisable as the historical Darmstadt at this stage; Iddon’s thorough prehistory describes them as ‘ramshackle affairs in most respects’, to the extent that they primarily functioned ‘as experiments in finding out what the courses could be and how they might function’.6 Such a confusion of purpose in retrospect problematises the usual historiographical demarcations and conceptual vocabulary deployed to explicate the post-war avant-garde, especially the ‘zero hour’ myth. Contrary to Steinecke’s inaugural address, the first courses extensively programmed the work of composers implicated in the Nazi regime, and numerous works by such composers were heavily represented in the two following iterations.7 While many of the more compromised of these composers were dropped from the programmes of later

close enough to be that of a foster father; see below and Kirchmeyer, Kleine Monographie über Herbert Eimert (Leipzig: Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998), 9. 5 ‘[E]ine verbrecherische Kulturpolitik das deutsche Musikleben seiner führenden Persönlichkeiten und seines Zusammenhanges mit der Welt beraubt.’ Wolfgang Steinecke, reproduced in Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, eds., Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966 (Freiburg: Rombach, 1997), I.24–5. All translations by the author unless otherwise noted. 6 Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt, 21. Iddon’s subsequent claim that Steinecke was ‘guided more by contingency than by ideology’ during this period might be nuanced by the suggestion that Steinecke was indeed guided by ideology, just not a very clear or consistent one. 7 In addition to Carl Orff, Hermann Heiß, and Wolfgang Fortner: Werner Egk, Kurt Hessenberg, Helmut Degen, Ottmar Gerster, Gerhard Frommel, Harald Genzmer, Hugo Distler, Karl Marx, Ernst Pepping, Franz Flößner, Erich Sehlbach, Hugo Herrmann, Gerhard Schwarz, Paul Höffer, Hermann Reutter, Othmar Schoeck, Bruno Stürmer, Wilhelm Maler, and others. It should be noted, however, that such a repertoire was about the norm for programmes of contemporary art music in the aftermath of the war; see Ian Pace, ‘The Reconstruction of Post-War West German New Music during the early Allied Occupation (1945–46), and its Roots in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich (1918–45)’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cardiff, 2018), appendices.

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courses (e.g. Ernst Pepping and Kurt Hessenberg), other compromised figures, like Carl Orff and Wolfgang Fortner, continued to be prominently featured throughout the decade. From the outset, then, it is essential to maintain that the instrumentality of Darmstadt as discourse cannot be easily reconciled with the majority of the concrete administrative and programmatic decisions that were made about the courses themselves. A historical account solely focused on the latter would be able to present only the most glacial changes of repertoire over the first twenty years of the courses’ existence.8 Discursively, on the other hand, Darmstadt moves in lurches and jolts. The suture of Steinecke’s internationalist project to Leibowitz and Adorno’s historicist project, initiated in 1948 with the advent of Leibowitz as composition faculty and accomplished in 1950 with Steinecke’s announcement that Schoenberg’s work and thought formed the ‘pedagogical foundation’ and ‘primary departure point for work within the courses’,9 enacted a categorical re-grounding of the courses, presenting their pedagogical purpose as not only a social (i.e. internationalist) but also an aesthetic one aligned with a singular New Music. For about two years, this suture held in the critical discourse, and press reports, while disparaging, described a singular avant- garde of young composers at the forefront of the courses advancing a coherent and mutually understood aesthetic project, as in Stuckenschmidt’s grouping of works by Antoine Duhamel, André Casanova, and Michel Philippot (all current students of Leibowitz) as representing at once ‘the most aggressive of twelve-tone technique’ and ‘the danger of Leibowitzian radicalism’.10 Borio sums up this period elegantly: ‘Between 1948 and 1951, most of the young composers working in Darmstadt adopted twelve-tone technique’.11 Of course, in their explicit function as a forum for post-Schoenbergian dodecaphony, the Darmstadt courses operated as host to a musical practice which had been extensively theorised and developed over a vast global network. In rhetoric which might suggest to a cynical mind that the international charter of the courses had never been taken as an article of good faith, Stuckenschmidt repeatedly emphasises how such an alien practice had been artificially imported to Darmstadt by Leibowitz and his school.12 It is representative that the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress whose proceedings occupied three days of

8 To be sure, such an enterprise would be a welcome rejoinder to the lingering monumentalism of music historiography; nevertheless, its chronological scope exceeds that of the present study. 9 Hermann Danuser, ‘Die “Darmstädter Schule”–Faktizität und Mythos’,inIm Zenit der Moderne, II.341. 10 See Stuckenschmidt, ‘Apokalyptische Gespräche’,inIm Zenit der Moderne, III.390. 11 ‘Zwischen 1948 und 1951 eignen sich die meisten in Darmstadt wirkenden jungen Komponisten die Zwölftontechnik an.’ Borio, ‘Kontinuität der Moderne?’, Im Zenit der Moderne, I.187. 12 Stuckenschmidt, ‘Apokalyptische Gespräche’, 389.

Herbert Eimert and the Darmstadt School 5

the 1951 courses was an independently organised and constituted entity to which Darmstadt provided a forum – a forum which had previously been in Milan. At the conclusion of the Milan session, Wladimir Vogel, who co- organised the congress with Malipiero, envisioned an expansion of its pedagogical scope – a ‘more extensive meeting than the Milanese one’ with the introduction of ‘working groups’.13 After Vogel’s initial plans to organise the next congress in Locarno fell through, Steinecke intervened and proposed the Darmstadt courses as a potential venue.14 Not only would the congress have a captive audience, its activities would be integrated within the pedagogical apparatus of the courses, with Schoenberg himself leading a composition seminar.15 Matters did not proceed entirely as planned. Schoenberg soon can- celled due to serious illness (although not soon enough to prevent the advertis- ing of his presence); Steinecke offered leadership of Schoenberg’s session to Vogel, who modestly declined and then later demurred from attending the congress altogether.16 He was, of course, ultimately replaced by Adorno. Carlo Piccardi’s study of the Dodecaphonic Congress emplots the moment of Vogel’s abdication as the bookend to the dodecaphonic era more broadly, with the young Darmstadt composers at the 1951 courses exclusively engaged with the radical ‘post-Webernian current’, in effect resulting in ‘a second avant- garde’.17 Piccardi and Borio’s bracketing, once again, is a discursive one. If the 1951 courses may be read as a victory lap or high-water mark of international dodecaphony, such a demarcation is far less visible in the musical practices represented at the courses or the congress itself. To be sure, the congress programme was, on its own terms, a systematic one, moving from a discussion on a ‘systematic representation of “classic” twelve-tone technique and its possibilities’ to the ‘possibilities for continuation of twelve-tone technique (mutations of such in the work of younger composers)’.18 And Goeyvaerts’s recollection that the twelve-tone method ‘had caught on’, like Piccardi and Borio’speriodisation,

13 Carlo Piccardi, ‘Tra ragioni umane e ragioni estetiche: i dodecafonici a congresso’,inNorme con Ironie: scritti per i settant’anni di Ennio Morricone, ed. Laura Gallenga (Milan: Suivini Zerboni, 1998), 250. 14 Steinecke to Vogel, 21 November 1950; cited in Piccardi, ‘Tra ragioni’, 250. 15 Ibid. 16 See Piccardi, ‘Tra ragioni’, 251. Piccardi characterises Vogel’s excuses as ‘trivial’, but astutely concludes that the composer was probably far more comfortable remaining in Switzerland (it is not difﬁcult to imagine Vogel seeing the transition from lakeside Locarno to Woog-side Darmstadt as a considerable downgrade, institutional apparatus notwithstanding). 17 Ibid. 18 ‘Systematische Darstellung der “klassischen” Zwölftontechnik und ihrer Möglichkeiten’, ‘Erweiterungsmöglichkeiten der Zwölftontechnik (Mutationen derselbe im Schaffen der jüngeren Komponisten)’; occurring on 3 July and 4 July 1951, respectively. See Im Zenit der Moderne, III.548.

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is partially borne out by the programmed concerts, which featured the more reliable of the younger dodecaphonists like Henze, Togni, and Wildberger.19 But such a discursive stability was negotiated against musical practices which were far less stable and systematic: Wildberger’s piece, for example, was immediately followed by Goeyvaerts’s in the second ‘Musik der jungen Generation’ concert.20 Even the official concert of the congress contained two pieces by Hauer alongside the freely atonal and expressionistic Zwei Stücke for clarinet and piano by Egon Wellesz, a composer who Adorno had marked as pursuing a ‘bad modernism’, with the likes of Werner Egk and Hermann Reutter, which must be resisted.21 Indeed, the other two representatives of this ‘bad modernism’ had been programmed, alongside Carl Orff, on the opening concert of the 1951 courses.22 Yet the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress appears from press responses to have been the defining fixture of the courses, with the premiere of Schoenberg’s ‘Der Tanz um das goldene Kalb’ representing its ultimate triumph. Indeed, the ecumenical and stabilising movement of international dodecaphony – Piccardi notes the ‘pluralistic’ character of the concert programming for the congress in Milan –23 very nearly appears to have encompassed the entirety of Darmstadt’s discursive economy, incorporating even erstwhile dissi- dents like Hermann Heiß and Herbert Eimert into its service.24 There was, nonetheless, a limit to the stability of this discourse, a point past which something of Piccardi’s ‘second avant-garde’ begins to appear. As Schoenberg’s replacement, Adorno’s composition seminar was the pedagogical extension of the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress. His encounter with Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen, and the minor press attention it generated, runs contrary to the otherwise unqualified focus on dodecaphony as international New Music practice. Adorno’s defensive response – the cultic, ex- centric relegation to Adrian Leverkühn und sein Famulus – might well have been the last word if discursive provisions had not been made to integrate the music of the Sonata for Two Pianos into the mainstream of international- institutional New Music. It is only at this point after the encounter that Webern finally arrives, acting as a retroactive tether to Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen’s ex-centric, eccentric, and

19 Ibid., III.547–51. 20 Ibid., III.550. 21 Referenced in Gianmario Borio, ‘Dire cela, sans savoir quoi: The Question of Meaning in Adorno and in the Musical Avant-Garde’, trans. Robert L. Kendrick, in Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 43. 22 Im Zenit der Moderne, III.544. Egk’s offering, an Orchester-Sonate for large orchestra (1948), had previously been performed in the closing concert of the 1948 courses under the composer’s baton. 23 Piccardi, ‘Tra ragioni’, 228. 24 Im Zenit der Moderne, III.548.

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pre-Scholastic practice. Eimert’s deployment of Webern, then, operates as a gesture of affirmation – Adorno’s orientation, and that of international dodecaphony, is not wrong, Eimert says; it is simply technically insufficient, it has missed the most important, most historically propositional aspects of the very practice it advocates. Eimert accepts international, historically conditioned dodecaphony and its universal validity – most obviously in his role as a participant in the Second International Twelve-Tone Congress, at which he gave a presentation arguing that twelve-tone music is a universal technique rather than a mannerist style – but proposes a subsequent stage in this historical evolution: ‘punctual’ music developed from Anton Webern’s mature works. 25 Next to Goeyvaerts’s and Stockhausen’s firm denial of Adorno’s practice as a search for chickens in abstract paintings, Eimert here enacts both a reconciliation and an elevation of Adornian-Leibowitzian dodecaphony. Simultaneously, Goeyvaerts’sSonataand Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel are not at all aberrations which subsist outside of the teleology of New Music, as Adorno had mistakenly taken them to be. Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen’s rejoinder to Adorno, then, becomes just that – an event of course-correction or aesthetic clinamen rather than ideological overhaul. Through the advent of ‘punctual music’, Adornian-Leibowitzian historicism is not dis- carded, but enlarged. The discourse of New Music is re-stabilised.

2 After Dodecaphony: Darmstadt 1951 Eimert’s institutional clout at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1951 was such that he presented a joint lecture with the director of the courses, Wolfgang Steinecke, titled portentously ‘Is Music at an End? An Optimistic Meditation on Musical Limit-Situations’.26 The lecture is revealing to the extent that it provides a context and a theoretical precedent for the aesthetic-historical positions Eimert would later use to foreground the young Darmstadt composers (although it is unclear to what extent Steinecke also contributed to this lecture). Eimert, in evidently Adornian fashion, positions the New Music as an ‘optimistic’ oppos- ition to the ‘pessimistic’ narrative of ‘the last Romantics’, exempliﬁed in Pﬁtzner, as well as to the ‘turn to a classical austerity’ found in Stravinsky,

25 Eimert, ‘Zwölftonstil oder Zwölftontechnik?’, given 2 July 1951 as the opening talk of the congress; see Im Zenit der Moderne, III.548. 26 ‘Ist die Musik am Ende? Eine optimistische Betrachtung über musikalische Grenzsituationen’, in Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966, ed. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser (Freiburg: Rombach, 1997), III.340–53. The key word Grenzsituation hints at the philosophical debt this lecture owes to the work of philosopher Karl Jaspers. Elsewhere, Borio gives the date of this lecture as 1950, but this is surely a lapsus calami, since the lecture contains a recording of Nono’s Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schoenberg (1950) which was ﬁrst performed at the conclusion of the 1950 courses (ibid., I.269).

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Bartók, Hindemith, and Honegger.27 Later, in Steinecke’s words, the New Music is characterised – again using terms taken from Karl Jaspers – by Verbindlichkeit, which is defined as both ‘objective legitimacy of expression and authenticity of form’.28 Eimert, switching to a polemical mode, then tells his listeners: ‘You are now going to hear a series of examples, which represent such typical limit-situations in modern music. It is very extraordinary and extreme musical examples which we bring, they have no “reconciliation” and whoever has based his musical position purely on history, presumably without any inkling of our own historical catastrophe, will hear such music only with the gravest chagrin.’29 Strikingly, the examples curated by Eimert are immediately recognisable as something nearly approximating the canonic litany of the European avant-garde that one finds to this day in historical overviews: two pieces, Intégrales (1925) and Ionisation (1933), by Varèse; Tre lieder per sonare a venti-sei by Goeyvaerts; Le soleil des eaux by Boulez; Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schoenberg (1950) by Nono; Psyché (1946) by Jolivet (the only example that might look out of place in a textbook New Music canon); and, crucially, Webern’s Piano Variations, op. 27 (1936). It is essential to note that, while Varèse and Nono had previously attended the courses, all of the other music deployed by Eimert had, at best, a tenuous relationship to the institution of Darmstadt as it existed in 1951. While Webern’s Piano Variations were performed at the 1948 courses, the decision to use such a piece as a foundational criterion of New Music – especially Darmstadtian New Music – was a far from obvious one, since this performance was the only piece of Webern programmed in 1948, in contrast with four pieces by Schoenberg, three each by Bartók, Blacher, Milhaud, and Honegger, and ten by Hindemith (eleven if one counts the new version of Das Marienleben (1936–1948), performed in addition to the 1922–1923 version).30 As such, Eimert here presents for the first time a template for the Darmstadt School: Boulez, Goeyvaerts, and Nono, with Varèse and Webern as their spiritual predecessors. Eimert’s curation in effect synthesises a foundation myth for Darmstadt modernism predicated on the operative historicism used by Theodor Adorno and René Leibowitz to establish Schoenbergian dodecaphony as the

27 Ibid., III.341–2. Although Steinecke, perhaps playing the good cop, has some kind words for Palestrina (1917). 28 Ibid., III.343. 29 ‘Sie werden gleich eine Reihe von Beispielen hören, die solche typischen Grenzsituationen der modernen Musik darstellen. Es sind musikalisch außerordentlich extreme Beispiele, die wir bringen, sie haben nichts “Versöhnliches”, und wer seine musikalische Position ausschließlich in der Geschichte bezogen hat, vermutlich ohne jegliche Ahnung von unserem eigenen geschich- tlichen Verhängnis, der wird solche musik nur mit äußerstem Missvergnügen hören.’ Ibid., III.344. 30 See Im Zenit der Moderne, III.527–32.

Herbert Eimert and the Darmstadt School 9

singular manifestation of historically advanced musical production,31 amyth whose development was overseen by Eimert himself over the course of the following decade. Eimert’s reading of New Music – since this talk is being given alongside the director of the Ferienkurse, this is undoubtedly institutional, ‘official’ New Music – inevitably reveals his preoccupation with his own historical status as a composer in post-war Germany. To this end, Varèse’s Ionisation is seen as a representation of modern warfare, and Eimert criticises the ‘ill-adjusted audience’ who, oblivious to this, had greeted its performance the previous year in Darmstadt with jeers.32 Eimert’s reading of Webern is still more iconoclastic. Drawing on Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Eimert presents Webern’s work as a ‘taking-back’ (Zurücknahme) of nineteenth-century romanticism, in parallel with the Faustian composer Adrian Leverkühn’s desire to retract the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.33 This retraction is at once metaphorical and literal: Eimert uses the conclusion of Leverkühn’s(fictional) cantata, where a high cello note is slowly and extremely quietly sustained before finally being overcome by silence, as a thematic analogy to Webern’s music, which ‘consists of naked row-skeletons and avoids all historical forms (such as fugue, canon, imitation, complementary rhythms, etc.). Anton Webern’,he concludes, ‘is a master of these history-less and abstract sound-forms, he has, so to speak, conceived – far beyond Schoenberg – twelve-tone music to its end.’34 Furthermore, Eimert and Steinecke emphasise the hermetic quality of this music, the latter pointing out that, despite its small audience, Webern’s music is ‘more real’ than ‘Unterhaltungsmusik, which inundates humanity like lukewarm bathwater’, and the film and radio music heard by millions.35 As with Varèse, Webern’s supposed inaccessibility to a wide public is positioned by Eimert and Steinecke as a crucial legitimising facet of his music. On the other hand, the younger generation are portrayed as stuck in a creative crisis, unsure of what should come after the Neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith (which recalls Eimert’s rejection of Stockhausen’s Drei Lieder as

31 See Theodor Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik,inGesammelte Schriften XII, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975) and René Leibowitz, Schoenberg and His School, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949). 32 Ibid., III.347–8. The trope of the misunderstood composer besieged by an ignorant public, most probably Eimert’s personal exegesis of Schoenberg–Adorno’s thought, would of course become a cliché of historical narratives of the post-war musical avant-garde. 33 Ibid., III.348. 34 ‘ ... aus nackten Reihengerüsten bestehen und allen historischen Formen (wie Fuge, Kanon, Imitation, komplementäre Rhythmik usw.) bewußt aus dem Wege gehen. Anton Webern ist ein Meister dieser geschichtslos-abstrakten Klangformen, er hat – weit über Schoenberg hinaus – die Zwölftonmusik gewissermaßen zu Ende gedacht.’ Ibid., III.348–9. 35 Ibid., III.349.

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‘too conservative’).36 Three tentative paths forward are represented by Boulez, Goeyvaerts, and Nono. In Eimert and Steinecke’s reckoning, Boulez represents a sort of synthesis between Webern and Schoenberg in his vocal writing, while his use of timbre and rhythm are characteristic of ‘young French music’ under the influence of Olivier Messiaen.37 To further illustrate this influence, Eimert and Steinecke play a recording of Goeyvaerts’s Tre lieder per sonare a venti- sei.38 Like Boulez, Goeyvaerts is presented as a member of the ‘young French school’ interested in the ‘previously unknown possibilities of sound production’, which Steinecke connects back to Varèse.39 Revealingly, Goeyvaerts’s piece is here contrasted with the ‘strict twelve-tone work’ of Nono, with the suggestion that a synthesis between the two is the next necessary historical evolution in New Music: Goeyvaerts’s (and Varèse’s) timbral innovations lack a strong formal basis and Nono’s ‘completely new style’ is hindered by his ‘outdated orchestration’.40 Eimert and Steinecke’s blueprint laid out in this lecture would largely proceed as planned over the next decade at Kranichstein, with some reshuffling of the parts: Goeyvaerts would take Nono’s place as the ‘strict’ serialist and Nono would be presented as representing the sensitive, humanist dimension of the New Music. The synthesis Eimert and Steinecke describe was to be carried out by the composer who became metonymic with the Darmstädter Ferienkurse: Karlheinz Stockhausen.

3 Darmstadt 1952 3.1 Preparations After Stockhausen’s extraordinarily inspiring meeting with Goeyvaerts at the 1951 courses, which culminated in the two young composers performing the second movement of Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1950–1951) for a bewildered Adorno, Stockhausen immediately started work on a new piece using radically new techniques, ﬁrst called Mosiake, but later, on Goeyvaerts’s suggestion, changed to Kreuzspiel.41 He also moved to Paris at the beginning of 1952 in order to study with Messiaen and Milhaud, again inspired by Goeyvaerts’s example. Stockhausen’s presence in Paris also made him an

36 Ibid., III.350. 37 Ibid., III.351. 38 According to Borio and Danhauser, the portion of the lecture which names the piece by Goeyvaerts being played is missing, but from the context (e.g. the mention of the ondes martenot) it can be conﬁdently asserted that the recording played is of the Tre lieder. See ibid., III.352. 39 Ibid., III.352. 40 Ibid. 41 See Herman Sabbe, ‘Die Einheit der Stockhausen-Zeit: Neue Erkenntnismöglichkeit der ser- iellen Entwicklung anhand des frühen Wirkens von Stockhausen und Goeyvaerts. Dargestellt aufgrund der Briefe Stockhausens an Goeyvaerts’,inKarlheinz Stockhausen: ... wie die Zeit verging ..., Musik-Konzepte, 19 (Munich: text + kritik, 1981), 18.